Fletcher

by David Horscroft

  Glass was everywhere, and I knew Vincent would be on his way down. I pulled the bigger shards out of my knee and headed for the door before running straight into the occupant of the flat.

  “You’ll do,” I had growled, before punching her smartly in the throat. I felt the windpipe crumple under my knuckles but couldn’t stop to enjoy the moment.

  Door, stairs. Burst of concrete by my ear from Vincent, a floor up. I like to think he missed on purpose. I was faster than him, though, and put three flights between us by the time I sprinted out of the lobby. He didn’t catch up.

  It was in the news the next day. Star policeman saves two lives, killer on the loose. Usually I’d have been pissed, but I wasn’t even mad. The game had just begun.

  #0192

  “Where the fuck did this extra femur come from?”

  22: Free

  I collapsed in the middle of a field. The rain soaked my skin and cut through my last reserves of warmth and energy. Body heat—non-existent. The grass slumped over my face under its own water weight. Droplets exploded on my eyelids.

  I wasn’t sad. I was cold.

  In the distance, a truck rumbled. I started to shiver slowly, but the downpour was easing up and something resembling light was creeping up from the east.

  I wasn’t sad. I was tired.

  There was nothing but a solemn breeze by the time I moved. I pushed through my green wrappings and emerged into the drizzling, dismal (drismal?) morning gloom. Swathes of green surrounded me, but off to my right was a short fence running alongside a dirt road. I needed to get warm, and I needed to get moving.

  I wasn’t sad. I was free.

  In my hand nestled the handgun, one bullet left. The jumpsuit hugged my skin. My bare feet were slashed up and I spent four minutes pulling out a briar’s love bite. There was no blood flow and the cold numbed any pain, but standing up was still a tender process. Movement? More tender still. I headed towards the road, step by step, rubbing mud over my jumpsuit. On the barbed wire fence I shredded the top until nothing but rags covered my upper body, and flicked deep scratches along my sides. I no longer looked like an escapee; I looked like a traumatised, escaped abductee.

  I wasn’t sad. I was on the loose.

  I covered my chest with muddy arms, pressing cold steel to my skin, and stumbled down the road. My look was only partly deception; exhaustion laid hooks deep into my bones and dragged me downwards. Multiple times, I stumbled into the dirt. But just as many times, I rose again, fighting off gravity and pain and everything else.

  The car was a literal deus ex machina, humming down the road and pulling to a halt meters before me. Something jazzy was crackling through the radio; it made me think of the Midnight Hour. I heard the owner speaking, repeating himself (herself?) into a phone: something about an ambulance. A location; repeated twice, then once more. Signal death, clearly. She (he?) tried again. No luck. I stood, shivering, until I felt a blanket over my shoulders.

  Save the bullet for later.

  It was definitely a she. A plump woman, something of a deep voice. That’s what threw me. I huddled in the back seat of the car, heat blasting into my face, half-listening to the words she was speaking. The sun struggled to break the clouds behind me; we were heading further west. Not too far, I hoped. Time passed, the car stopped, and we got out. I found myself on a couch, still hugging the weapon to my chest. She told me she was going to call the authorities.

  I stood up, told her she shouldn’t be so trusting, and shot her in the face. She slumped back over the couch, decorating the worn fabric with a rich, red gout. Her death struck me as senseless and tasteless, and I almost felt like regretting it for a second. It was just tacky… I showered and recovered slightly.

  I didn’t linger around the house. Pictures everywhere indicated the existence of a family. Initially, I toyed with the idea of creating a human marionette troupe, but the idea of killing indiscriminately was both lacklustre and nauseating at the same confusing moment. Instead I stole fresh clothes and fresh bread. I found a motorbike in the shed and took to the road.

  The weather had become miserable again. I rode as fast as the damp ground would allow, doing what I could to outstrip the rain behind me. The murky sprawl of the city opened up in front of me, and I accelerated.

  #0187

  “Marceline is dead. I got the call just after midnight. Tequila and sleeping pills. Maybe I shouldn’t have said those things. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone out of my way to hurt her. I guess I really should have seen this coming, ha-ha-ha. As if the self-harm wasn’t warning enough.

  “She had a fascinating mind. I would have liked to pick it in her final moments, as the slurry of alcohol and benzo ransacked her body. I wonder what it felt like... I wonder if there was pain.

  “I’m not sorry I said those things to her. I’m just curious as to why they worked so well.”

  23: Solving Problems

  I tore through the streets as the sun set. Anger scorched searing marks in my mind, but a practical voice spoke out. I had to recover. I had to dig deeper and find out what RailTech was doing. My next mistake was likely to be my last. They were hell-bent on protecting something, and I had to find out what.

  First, I would sleep. The hissing doors welcomed me back. I staggered through them in a daze and collapsed onto my bed. Mud smeared the sheets, tinged with red from my injuries. I’d disinfect them in the morning.

  I did not dream. I did not revisit memories. My rest was unbroken, my body shattered and fragile and desperate for regeneration. For a brief moment, I woke up happy and calm. Thoughts of Vincent quickly soured this mood. My trio was down to one.

  I lay, awake but immobile, until I heard an echo in the halls.

  Quisling.

  I’d forgotten about her so many times it was almost a running gag. This time was hardly my fault, though. I showered and went downstairs.

  She’d clearly rationed the food I’d given her. It had been finished, but she didn’t seem to be starved. The desks had been tipped on their side. One of the legs had been broken off and thrown at the glass. I think she was trying to get a sliver. She hadn’t succeeded.

  The noise was from her attempts to break off another. A furious look was on her face. She screamed as I spoke.

  “Someone lives here, you know,” I said petulantly.

  Pure hatred filled her expression. My arrival came as a surprise to her. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  “More’s the pity.”

  I angled my head to the left and looked her up and down, curiously.

  “All considered, you have a mouth on you. Maybe be nicer to the person who has you shackled to a wall?”

  It was her turn to throw the curious glance. “Something’s changed. What happened?” she asked.

  She was perceptive. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t slammed her head in a drawer today.

  “Are you hungry?” I countered evasively.

  “I could eat.”

  “I’ll cook.”

  I rescued a pan from the kitchen and fried several rashers of bacon. I’d been saving them in the freezer for an important moment.

  No time like the present.

  I realised how hungry I was. The bread from the farmhouse had kept me going, but the fried meat smelled amazing. Hot oil spat out of the pan onto my arm. I tried to enjoy a basic rhythm to my work.

  ***

  “And just like that, dead. Gone.”

  Quiz leaned against the upturned desk and chewed.

  “That makes two. I can feel my life expectancy dwindling from this conversation alone.” I blinked before I realized what she meant by the comment.

  “We aren’t friends, Quisling.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not ever. You know what’s going to happen.”

  “Either way, I’m boned. Either way, you kill me.”

  I nodded and finished a mouthful before responding. I’d toasted some bread in the l
eftover grease. It tasted like a coronary—a rich, delicious coronary.

  “Should I feel bad?” I pondered aloud.

  “I have a feeling we define that differently.”

  “I killed my two best friends. Sure, Valerie was dead to rights anyway—”

  “Not using it right.”

  “—and I didn’t know it was Vincent. I’m surprised at the initial shock. I’ve tried to kill Vincent a few times, but this… This wasn’t special. This was blind bullets through a door.”

  There was a silence. Quisling shrugged.

  “Maybe you ‘deserved more’? There was no epic showdown. No great struggle to the death. No flashy contest. You were cheated out of your crowning victory. Vincent must have represented something pretty high up there to have that effect on you.”

  Vincent had been important to me. I couldn’t deny that. He was my greatest experiment and exploration into the twisting front of morality. I’d taken the force’s golden boy and showed him how to nurture his inner lizard. I cleared my throat and asked a question, without expecting an answer.

  “Do you know how to manufacture a monster? I do. See, you start with a strong man, who holds strong convictions. A weak man with strong convictions will litanise and evangelise about his beliefs, but will never really act upon it, and the ones who are strong with weak convictions are likely to be monsters already. A weak man, with weak convictions, is of no value to anyone.

  “So you take this strong man, and his strong convictions, and you find the logical inconsistency in their structure. That’s the nice things about strong convictions: there’s always a weakness. You take this logical flaw, this hole in the dyke, and you worry at it. You pick and chip and jab at it until—with enough patience and skill—it breaks. So now what do you have? Not a strong man with weak convictions. You have a strong man with broken convictions who, given time, will reconstruct and rebuild and return to his initial state. But that’s the trick, see? He will rebuild with the debris of his broken beliefs; therefore, the one who broke them has the chance to leave a few bricks of their own at the scene. In this way, you incorporate your essence into their reconstructed beliefs. In this way you alter their ideology to more closely represent your own. Now… Now you have a strong man, with strong convictions. But these convictions are not entirely his. At that stage, the line between child murderer and national hero becomes very thin indeed.”

  I had worried at Vincent’s convictions for a long time. The gambit really started when I’d forced his hand with an unwinnable dilemma: either he killed a prime suspect in a series of gruesome murders, or I let the suspect run free. I had already arranged his passage out of the country: either Vincent acted now, or lost him forever. He had hesitated and breathed deeply before stepping forward, tensing himself and booting the gagged man off the roof. For Vincent’s First Victim, the fall was far and fatal.

  “It was all a lie, of course,” I murmured, more to myself than to Quisling. “He wasn’t guilty. His crimes were mine, dressed up and disguised. First Victim was completely innocent. Vincent was so angry, I thought he’d never forgive me. I’d tainted him, in his eyes. I’d corroded the cute concept of justice he’d fought so hard to maintain. I’d used it against him.”

  “I can see why he thought you were friend material.”

  “He didn’t, at first. He hated me. He hated me because I was right. I was right about what was inside, about what lurked behind the eyes. I was right about the part of him that would kick a helpless man from a rooftop without even checking for guilt. Deep down, Vincent is—was as sick-fuck-twisted as I am, and he hated me because I was the only person on earth who knew. He engaged me because he thought he could catch me. He thought he could draw me into the light and burn me. He waited in ambush for so long and eventually it wasn’t just a temporary hiding spot. It was something real, and it was ours.”

  “Practically a romance. Romeo and Juliet, roll over.”

  “Watch it. Something shifted when he left the force. He chased me off the clock, worked to track me down. Went full Bruce Wayne on me. But he left the force to go somewhere better: the secret service. For the first time, he called me. ‘Fletcher,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition.’ I’ve never grinned so hard in my life. My cheeks literally hurt. He had been pointed at the leader of a cult, some strange Zensunni spinoff with overarching narcotic elements. The leader was a mystical drug kingpin who had masterfully wreathed an entire industry in smoke and mirrors. Scores of brutal murders were attributed to him. He was quite an intriguing character.”

  “So what was the proposition?”

  “It was a challenge: a friendly contest for whoever could orchestrate the leader’s disappearance. In hindsight, I realise that it was actually a gambit. He was using me, using me to draw the leader and his resources thin, while Vincent went for the real target—his daughter. I should have seen it, of course. The daughter wanted out and Vincent needed to extract her. He underestimated, however, my affinity with mayhem and my capacity to cause it. Once the smoke settled and the fire died and the leader stopped twitching from his rope, the daughter was gone. Not that she was useful anymore. The cult was done for.”

  A focused expression had filtered over Quisling’s face. She was listening raptly.

  “And that, that was the tipping point. The Batman impression stopped. I got more calls, and with those calls came money. My services were being officially rendered. That’s what I do: I’m a private investigator and a problem solver. People come to me with their mysteries, people come to me with their problems. I solve them. I fix them. Vincent was my most magical problem yet, and I tried to fix him. But in the end, there was some thread of moral fibre I could not cut. Even in the end.”

  “You feel like you failed. You failed because you shot your experiment before you could complete your sick Joker fantasy, to continue the analogy, and it’s killing you. You have a phenomenal way with stories. You could have been an actor.”

  “Acting never interested me. I do it every day. Studying it would be rancid.”

  “But you did study?”

  “I studied for two years. Forensics and criminology. I didn’t finish my degree.”

  “Didn’t get the marks?”

  I chuckled.

  “No. Three university students were found dead. Suicide, but the police were investigating. Had to get out of Dodge. What did you do? Before... Before everything.”

  She pulled her knees closer. I got up and took her empty plate.

  “I was a teacher, a preschool teacher. I despised kids. I was a teacher who hated kids.”

  “That’s a problem I could solve.”

  “You should advertise better. I went into teaching because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. To help, I guess. But every single day I spent with those rat bastards, I hated them more and more. I hated myself more and more and more. So when it all happened, I packed the essentials into a backpack and left everything. I told myself I was going on an adventure. God knows I had one.”

  “Almost a pity that it comes to an end here, fifteen metres below the earth. I’m sure you have some stories of your own. What happened to your family?”

  She smiled, strangely. “I didn’t keep in contact with anyone from before. They were the part of the Old Amanda. I’m Quisling now. Amanda-Quisling, at the very least. I am becoming something new.”

  “Teacher turned scavenger. Engage the lizard brain. Tell me, Quisling. Have you had to take a life?”

  She thought about the question for a long time.

  That’s a yes.

  She was thinking how to phrase it. Maybe she didn’t want to excite me. Maybe she hadn’t admitted it to herself fully.

  “Never without due cause. The first person I ever killed was a looter. He thought he could take me along with the spoils. He was wrong.”

  “He tried to—”

  “Yes. Have you ever had to do that? Defend yourself from that?”

  I nodded.

  “Three times. O
nce, during the Chaos. It might be me, though. I exude a bit of a slutty vibe.”

  “So you were asking for it?”

  “Maybe I was baiting.”

  I had actually only baited once. I didn’t share this fact with Quiz. I got to my feet.

  “Still no chance of letting me go?”

  “No. But it’s been nice getting to know you, Quisling. I must take my leave.”

  ***

  The entire third level was now a museum, dedicated to Strauch and RailTech. Strands of wool threaded across the room, linking pieces of evidence and information. Where his family lived, where he lived, his income and expenses. His previous jobs and recommendation letters from each. Articles about project 429 met in the centre of the room, along with everything on John Rourke. I dredged books from the Helix library; they lay strewn about and open on important pages. Sticky notes poked out from the closed sections.

  Something finite had exploded back into infinites. RailTech was planning something big. My quarrel now lay with the entire organisation—every surviving wretch from the White Plains Facility, every guard and researcher and grimy assistant. Strauch was still the golden prize, but now I wanted to sink his entire outfit.

  Firstly, I had to eliminate other distractions. Close my cases. John Rourke’s father had left me a message. I told him some of what I knew, or guessed.

  “Your son definitely killed his wife, and himself. He may have been coerced or forced by the people who he worked for. Tell no one for the sake of your family.”

  Another message had come through, an automated notification from my online archives, warning me of an unauthorised access attempt. Tut-tut, RailTech.

  Getting sloppy. Getting desperate.

  Three of my insurance sites had taken a nosedive and were unavailable. RailTech had somehow managed to locate the servers through the veil of the deep internet. Despite their desperation, they were good.

  The final message had no title. I read it. Then I read it again. I scrolled back to the top and started from the beginning.